A person sits across from me and says they are doing fine, mostly. They have come because something prompted it: a season that feels flat, a faith that has gone quiet, a friend who suggested it might help to talk. I have forty-five minutes and the handful of things they have chosen to tell me. I listen for the thread. Sometimes I find it quickly. Often I do not, and only weeks later does it become clear that the strain was not where I first looked, that the dryness they named a prayer problem was, in fact, a depletion they had no language for, and that we spent good and limited time tending the wrong place. This is the ordinary condition of the work, whatever we call it. We bear real responsibility for how a person is doing throughout their life with God, and we do so largely without a map.

On paper, this person is doing everything right. They are in the Word most mornings. They serve faithfully, lead the small group, and show up for the workday, the prayer chain, and the meal train. From the outside, it reads as devotion, and in many ways it is. But in the room with me, something else surfaces. There is a flatness underneath the faithfulness, a weariness they are reluctant to name because naming it feels like ingratitude. Eventually, the question comes out, usually offered as a confession rather than a complaint. I am doing all of it, and I feel almost nothing. Is this it?

On the surface, it often looks like a desired behavior: sacrificing oneself for others (John 15:13) or preferring others to oneself (Philippians 2:3-4). In the clients I have worked with most closely, it can look like remarkable selflessness, until you look at what is driving it. Dig below the surface, and a gnawing sense of valuelessness begins to appear. The “desired behavior” is not rooted in an overflow of love toward others but rather in an attempt to fill a hole within themselves. The self-neglect, the self-criticism, the inability to receive care from others, these are not the marks of a person who loves well. They are the marks of a person who has never been taught to receive.